2017's Better Watch Out is a Nasty Nugget that Asks "What if Home Alone's Kevin McAllister Were EVEN MORE of a Violent Sociopath?"
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The genius of the Christmas-themed 2017 psychological thriller Better Watch Out is that it does not ask, “What if Kevin McAllister, the suspiciously resourceful child of privilege Macauley Culkin played in Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York were a violent, unhinged sociopath?” but rather the much more relevant query, “What if Kevin McAllister were even more of a violent, unhinged sociopath? How scary would that be?”
I’ve always despised Home Alone and Christmas Vacation, both of which John Hughes wrote but did not direct, because they are unconscionably cruel and hateful, particularly where the poor and uneducated are concerned, yet are celebrated as Christmas classics.
I’ve always seen Home Alone as the sadistic story of an evil bourgeoisie fuck who gets his jollies torturing a pair of innocent schmucks whose manner of transferring wealth he finds disagreeable in his violent defense of capitalism, consumerism, materialism and the American way.
To me Kevin McAllister is the class enemy. I don’t care if he’s both fictional and a child: when the revolution comes he’s getting it first and I’m not even allowing him a single cigarette before he goes before the firing squads.
Viva la revolution!
Sorry, I got a little carried away there. Thinking about Home Alone always brings out the Bolshevik in me.
So you can imagine how excited I was to discover that in this Australia-shot but American-set sleeper that here the rich, handsome white kid with the implausible genius for devising and executing elaborate booby traps is a deranged villain instead of a smug hero.
But before Better Watch Out becomes a fiendishly clever twist on Home Alone it toys with being a lean, economical home invasion thriller. Ashley DeJonge, who can currently be seen as Priscilla Presley in Elvis, stars as Ashley, a seventeen year old babysitter who agrees to babysit twelve year old Luke (Levi Miller) for parents Robert (Patrick Warburton) and Deandra (Virginia Madsen) despite knowing that he has a serious crush on her.
Being long on hormones and short on common sense the child decides to pursue his sexual fantasy of hooking up with his babysitter by seducing her. She is rightly and predictably horrified even as she gives him more encouragement than is probably healthy or appropriate.
So it’s more than a little suspicious when an unseen, masked intruder threatens the house and its inhabitants, which include Luke’s asshole stoner buddy Garrett (Ed Oxenbould). Is the homestead really under attack or is it just part of Luke’s excessively elaborate scheme to coax his babysitter into a compromising position?
The big reveal happens around the half hour mark, when Luke makes a striking if not entirely unexpected transformation from horny little jerk on a mission to get laid to pint-sized psychopath intent on taking what he wants, by force if necessary.
Luke is unfortunately not home alone. He has his best friend/henchman on hand for company as well as his babysitter turned captive to terrorize on this chilly December evening but he needs more people to torture so he tricks Ashley’s boyfriend into coming to the home and later her ex-boyfriend as well.
The film is not subtle in its allusions. Home Alone is explicitly referenced and one of the methods of execution comes directly from Chris Columbus’ beloved holiday staple. Childhood innocence and Christmas both get it in the back with a bloody shank in this decidedly deranged Christmas slasher.
Miller is the perfect combination of precocious moppet and remorseless mass murderer, the cross between Kevin McAllister and Patrick Bateman we never knew we needed. There’s something inherently creepy about child stars and children in movies.
Better Watch Out takes that creepiness to homicidal extremes. In Better Watch Out, good looking, confident kids can get away with murder literally as well as figuratively. Miller was barely in his teens when he starred in Better Watch Out.
That means that he should not have been allowed to watch the hard-R Yuletide bloodbath, let alone appeared in nearly every scene. Better Watch Out is a nasty nugget that gets off to an appropriately mean-spirited start with Madsen’s tart-tongued mom verbally castrating her weaker-willed hubby for shortcomings real and imagined.
Madsen handles her darkly comic dialogue with aplomb. It’s easy to see where her son might have gotten his nastiness from.
Better Watch Out takes place exclusively in an upscale family home that, like the house in Home Alone, witnesses incredible brutality and horror. The difference is that Better Watch Out is supposed to be the disturbing tale of a deranged child who lives to cause unimaginable pain while Home Alone is supposed to be a nice slapstick Christmas comedy for children.
My enduring, multi-faceted hatred of Home Alone made me an easy mark for Better Watch Out. I dug the concept but I liked the execution as well. It’s a modest little exercise in kiddie misanthropy but one that merits a place of pride in the grand pantheon of Christmas-themed terror tales.
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